Small Mercies

15

The first thing Mary Pat thinks when she reenters her apartment is that her place got robbed while she was at the rally. Nothing looks familiar. She wonders if she somehow let herself into the wrong unit — same layout as hers, yes, but the kitchen counters are clean, the floors have been swept, the ashtrays emptied. Not a beer can or sticky glass or pizza box in sight.

But in the next breath, she remembers...

Those bitches cleaned my home.

Was that why she took such pleasure in pounding the fuck out of them?

Possibly. Quite possibly.

She wanders down the hall to her bathroom and stands over the sink and looks in the mirror. She’s got a mouse growing under her left eye, scratches on her forehead (none deep), one on her neck (very deep; the blood soaks the collar of her blouse), a fat upper lip. In addition, what the mirror doesn’t show is the deep ringing in her right ear, like a fucking phone that won’t quit. She’s also twisted her left knee pretty good, and someone stomped the ankle of the same leg.

She goes to work first on the scratch in her neck with a series of cotton swabs and hydrogen peroxide, catches her reflection smiling even as she winces from the pain. “Pain means the peroxide’s working,” her mother always said. “Getting clean hurts.”

Mary Pat applies a large flesh-colored bandage to the cut once it’s clean. She’s got a basketful of Band-Aids, bandages, gauze, iodine, surgical shears, and antiseptic under that sink. It’s like the ER at City down there. Back when Dukie was in the Life, she needed it, of course. After he passed, she kept it around for Noel, who never met a conflict he couldn’t escalate into a fistfight.

Like mother, like son.

She smiles again. The truth is, she’s loved fighting ever since she can remember. Literally. Her first concrete memory of any length is of Willie Pike riding his bike through a puddle in front of the spit of lawn where four-year-old Mary Pat sat fussing over the hair of her Raggedy Ann doll. She saw the gleeful look in the little fucker’s eyes as he aimed the bike for the puddle. And he saw that she saw it. He pedaled faster, the little shit. Smashed his tires through the puddle and covered Mary Pat and Raggedy Ann in the slimy water that probably hadn’t come from rain — those puddles just sprang up all over Commonwealth, even during weeks of dry weather, and smelled of sulfur and bleach. She chased Willie Pike past four buildings before he wiped out on a turn. And when she got to him, she didn’t pause — a harbinger: she never paused in a fight — she unleashed. He was six and a boy, so there was no way she was going to win, but he was bleeding from both nostrils and crying like a pussy by the time he did get on top of her. He got a few licks in before Old Lady McGowan pulled him off and slapped him a few times around the head for good measure. Sure now, Old Lady McGowan told him, his father needed to strap his bottom black and blue for hitting a little girl. Old Lady McGowan thumb-poked him in the shoulder a few more times for emphasis before she walked Mary Pat back to the puddle to get her Raggedy Ann. When Mary Pat picked the doll up, it felt like lifting a trophy.

She’d have at least twenty more fights before she reached sixth grade — and those were the ones outside her door. Inside the Flanagan home, it was Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots from seven a.m. wake-up to ten p.m. shutdown. The boys — John Patrick, Michael Sean, Donnie, Stevie, and Bill — lived in one room. At one point, John Patrick’s senior year at Southie High and Bill’s first year in second grade, all five of them were living in there at the same time. Mary Pat’s father, those times she could remember him actually being home, would say the room smelled like a fish’s asshole. After John Patrick left — hitching a ride west; no one had heard from him in twenty years — a battle ensued for his top bunk. Donnie, who was stronger than Michael Sean, got it for the first six months, but Michael Sean spent all that year working out at L Street until he was stronger. About a week of fistfights and two broken noses later, Michael Sean got the top bunk, but Stevie hated the sound of Michael Sean snoring through his broken nose, so he tried to smother his brother with a pillow — Stevie, possessor of the scariest glare Mary Pat had ever seen, was always fucked in the head — and their mother had to break it up. Stevie, who was thirteen at that point, small and feral like their mother, slammed their mother’s head against the window and broke the pane. That it was it for Stevie, they shipped him off to St. Luke’s Home for Troubled Boys and never spoke of him again, even when they saw his name in the papers ten years later for that stickup that went horribly wrong in Everett.

The stitches — black, thick, and hard as metal, all seven of them — remained in the back of their mother’s head for three weeks, and when they came out, it wasn’t much better. For the rest of her life, Louise Flanagan’s hair grew around the scar and refused to fall over it, so it looked like all her thoughts, secrets, and shames could be accessed by pulling down on a red zipper in the back of her skull.

Not that her mother couldn’t dish it out as well as she took it. To this day, Mary Pat can’t look at a wooden spoon without recalling the sting of one against her wrist, her cheek, the poke of the tip in her stomach. And that was for the minor offenses. For the major offenses — Weezie’s shoe. She had three pairs, all prewar, all built to last. Every five or six years, she’d get the soles replaced, and then everyone walked on eggshells for weeks, hoping to not be chosen as the one she’d use to break them in.

If the old man was around, you had to watch out for his hands — the backs of the knuckles as hard and pointed as lug nuts, the flick of his index finger springing off his thumb into your temple, the grip of his fingers in your hair to drag you across the floor toward his belt (as he had the night Mary Pat got all Ds on her report card). Jamie Flanagan loved that belt most of all. He hung it on a hook just outside the bathroom door for that purpose only, used a different one to hold up his pants.

Then there were the internal skirmishes — between brother and brother, sister and sister, brother and sister, or, the worst of them all, two siblings against one. After Stevie and his faulty-hand-grenade temper were removed from the house, Donnie and Big Peg were given the widest berths because you never knew where you stood with them. But Mary Pat and Bill, once he grew up, were the ones everyone avoided getting really mad because neither had an off switch.

Her last fight with Big Peg, Mary Pat had spent two nights in the hospital with a concussion and compound fractures to the head because Big Peg had hit her full in the face with a brick, but what no one ever forgot was that before the ambulance arrived, Mary Pat returned to consciousness and finished that fucking fight before passing out again.

“I hit you with a brick,” Big Peg said when they wheeled her into the hospital room to visit Mary Pat. “A brick.”

“Next time use a cinder block,” Mary Pat said.

She hasn’t seen any of her brothers in years. Michael Sean joined the Merchant Marines and drops occasional Christmas cards from ports of call she otherwise would be unaware of — Cabo Verde, Maldives, South Sandwich. Donnie lives in Fall River and installs gutters. There’s no bad blood between them, just the unspoken acknowledgment that blood itself is all that ever tied them together. Last anyone heard of Bill, he was doing ten years for a stabbing in New Mexico, which was a surprise. Not the stabbing, the New Mexico part. Hot weather always made him irritable, which, come to think of it, might explain the stabbing.

Mary Pat finishes cleaning up and tosses all the bloody swabs in the wastebasket and wipes down the sink with a splash of rubbing alcohol. She considers herself in the mirror. Her face looks like she was dumped from the back of a truck into a pile of gravel. Her hands are screaming — not just the knuckles but the wrists. Her ribs ache. Ear still ringing away. Knee and ankle in need of ice.

She gets some from the freezer. Props the leg up on a kitchen chair, puts one napkin full of ice on the ankle, another on the knee. Outside the window, Commonwealth is eerily quiet. Everyone must still be at the rally or in the bars around City Hall. She sits there and smokes, flicking the ash into a spotless ashtray. She can’t believe how clean her kitchen is. They really did a nice job. Professional grade, she thinks with a smile.

For the first time in a week, she loves how she feels — bruised and scabbing up, the taste of blood in her mouth that some describe as bitter but she’s always felt was kind of buttery. She reaches behind her and turns on the radio, and the DJ, just coming out of commercial, welcomes her to settle in and listen to some Mozart, a boy genius who started composing at five.

“The Piano Sonata Number Eleven,” the DJ says in a voice as smooth as toffee, “is also known as the Rondo Alla Turca. Composed as a trifle, it has, over time, become one of his most popular pieces the world over.”

The DJ’s voice feels as if it’s coming from the darkest of rooms. She pictures him in the black, surrounded by the inky shadows of bookshelves.

The music begins and Mary Pat closes her eyes, floats in the light dance of the piano keys.

Mozart knew what he was supposed to do. He didn’t hunt down what he was good at — at five, he wasn’t searching. It found him. Greatness. Just as it found Ted Williams’s arm and eyes and legs. Just as it found James Joyce’s pen. (Not that she’d ever read Joyce, but she knows he’s the greatest Irish writer of all time.) Work only gets you so far. You have to lean into what you were born to do.

Mary Pat, since as long as she can remember, has been getting slapped, sometimes lightly, sometimes hard. She’s been punched, tripped, hit with hangers, hit with broomsticks, Wiffle-ball bats, those wooden spoons, her mother’s shoes, her father’s belt. Donnie once threw a bar of brown soap at the back of her head and knocked her completely off her feet. On the streets, she fought girls, boys, and packs of both. Anytime one person attacked her, she fought back against all of them, throughout her history, who’d ever hit her or twisted her hair or ear or nipple, anyone who’d ever screamed at her or snapped at her, hit her with a belt or a shoe. Everyone who had ever made her feel like a frightened little girl wondering what kind of fucked-up fire she’d been born into.

She can’t remember that girl, but she can feel her. She can feel her bafflement and terror. At the noise and the fury. At the storm of rage that swirled around her and spun her in place until she was so fucking dizzy from it, she had to learn to walk in it without falling down for the rest of her life.

And she learned well. She’s happiest when she’s opposed, most ecstatic when she’s been wronged.

She’s lost the last four days of her life to mourning.

Okay.

The mourning is not over — not by a long shot — but she decides, as she rises and tosses the ice into the sink, that it can be paused for a bit.

She opens every beer can in the fridge, one by one, drains them in the sink, and tosses the cans in the trash. She follows the cans with the bottles — of whiskey, of vodka, of — who the fuck brought this into my house? — peach schnapps. She rinses the sink until the smell is gone and wipes it down with the napkins that held the ice and throws those in the trash too.

She looks at the counters and resolves for them to stay that way. From here on out, it’s clean counters. Clean counters and a clear head.

She refills the liquor bottles with water from the tap and puts them in a cardboard box. Adds toilet paper and bags of chips and peanuts, a loaf of bread. She goes through the apartment with another box and adds any clothes she’ll want to wear over the next few days. She removes the basketful of medical supplies from under the bathroom sink. She takes the two boxes and the basket out to Bess and loads them in the trunk.

Back inside, she digs Dukie’s kit bag out of the corner of her closet. That’s what he always called it — his “kit” bag. It’s dark green canvas and, if caught on his person, could have added years to a burglary sentence. It contains the tools of his trade: lockpicks, a glass cutter and suction cup, electrical tape, a stethoscope, two bolt cutters (one small, one large), several watches (the batteries long since dead), nylons to use as masks, several pairs of gloves, a lock punch, duct tape, binoculars, and a pair of handcuffs and key.

Jesus, Dukie, she wonders, why the handcuffs?

“Never mind,” she says out loud. “I don’t wanna know.”

She leaves the dead watches behind, goes into the kitchen, and sweeps all the sharp knives into the bag. She gets Marty’s bag of money from the dresser drawer and walks those two bags out to Bess’s trunk too.

Her last trip to the apartment, she stands inside, taking it in for a minute. She’s lived here since she was twenty-two. Maybe she’ll see it again.

Maybe she won’t.